Since starting Anecdote in 2004, I’ve been lucky to meet a bunch of inspiring people. One of them is Paul Costello, who I’ve written about in my book, Putting Stories to Work. Paul is an amazing story practitioner and has been in the field for decades. He’s an Aussie who moved to America about 20 […]

Yes, I’ll admit it: it’s a trick, of course. But it’s a useful trick – especially for those of us who need to collect stories for organisations, communities, and even for family-history. The place is important here: it needs to be the right kind of place, the right atmosphere – the kind of ‘story-place’ where […]

You can learn about the power of storytelling in sales in the most unlikely places. We had first-hand experience of this recently when we took our chairman, Paul Honeywell, on a tour of the Yarra Valley wineries just outside Melbourne. Paul was over from England, so we wanted to show off some of our finest […]

  20 March is World Storytelling Day. On that date back in 2011, we launched TheStoryTest.com, a website designed to help people develop their ability to spot stories. We now have close to six years of data from across the globe about the ability of people to know what is and what is not a […]

Christmas is fast-approaching and it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, so we thought we’d make this year’s Christmas gifting a little easier. Most families or friendship circles have an avid or aspiring storyteller, so we’ve come up with a list of 11 things that any storyteller would […]

The process of becoming an effective storyteller in business is … well … a process. It doesn’t often happen by chance. The first step is learning how to spot a story. Then you need to start actively noticing stories – assessing things that happen in terms of their potential as useful stories. The next step […]

Last week I returned to Australia from the US after a three-week business tour. (It was a remarkable time to be there, though my sense is that while emotions are understandably running high over the election result, there is also a feeling that the US system is resilient.) I started the trip in Seattle, working […]

Twenty years ago, psychologist Anders Ericsson conducted research on what it takes to build expertise. Mere practice is not enough. If practice is all it takes to be great, taxi drivers would be the best drivers in the world. Ericsson discovered it takes a special type of practice to build better skills. He called it […]

My involvement with storytelling in business started back in 1998, when I joined the UK Audit Commission as a researcher. At that time, the Audit Commission was the public sector watchdog in the UK. It was well known for its hard-hitting and evidence-based research reports, which exposed poor performance, fraud and waste in the public […]

Last week I was in London and had the pleasure of catching up with Ian Rodwell from Linklaters, one of the largest law firms in the world and part of the magic circle of elite legal companies headquartered in the British capital. Ian has been a long-term advocate of our work and we spent an […]